The Fine Arts Department at Otis College of Art and Design is pleased to announce a group exhibition, When It's a Photograph, curated by Soo Kim, Artist and Otis Program Director of Photography.

When it's a photograph examines contemporary photography's current fascination with collage, cut-outs, photograms and other altered states of the traditional photograph. The show considers why these formal techniques of the avant-garde of the 1910s - 1940s are being revisited at this particular moment by photographers. In some cases, it is as a material-conscious reaction to digital image-making; in others it is a self-referential examination of photography and its existence as an art form that operates beyond the flat space of the photographic print.

The artwork included in the show is overtly constructed, the traditional photograph is treated as the central component in a larger scheme of art-making. The works use photography as collage or a ground for drawn or cut imagery or as a photographic trace in the case of the photogram. Even while prioritizing the medium of photography, the relationship between the photographic and the drawn, and the sculptural and the painted, is deliberately questioned, leading the viewer to consider what makes a photograph a photograph.

Exhibition Publication:A fully-illustrated publication will accompany When it's a Photograph, with texts by Charlotte Cotton and Phil Chang.

This exhibition and catalogue is made possible by The Philip and Muriel Berman Foundation.